I replied that it was all part of the implied bargain that we the troopers made when we raised our hands.
We promised to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. With our lives, if it came to that.
They - the Constitution in the form of our People, our government, our Army, and our officers - promised to hoard those lives and ensure they were spent as frugally as humanly possible.
The Old Lie is one thing.
The Old Lie, when the lie is told as part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?
That breaks the bargain.
And that got me thinking of how many bargains have been broken in the Plague Year.
So I posted this to my FB page today:
"Pandemic Timeline, Day 157: It suddenly seems utterly weird to be having a "day" about dead American soldiers when EVERY day hundreds and even thousands of Americans are dying all around us. Weird. And wrong."And a dear friend immediately spoke up about his disgust that the federal government had decreed an official day of mourning with the national flags flown at half staff for the dead of COVID-19; "Couldn't have waited another few days to let us honor fallen soldiers?"
And I understand that. I do. I know he and his family have a very dear friend who was killed in Iraq, and I'm sure they still feel the pain of that loss.
Our dead are with us always.
But this was my reply:
"But these poor suffering bastards are dying for their country - in the sense that they're dying because of decisions their government made - as much as anybody who got killed at Bataan or Fallujah.And with that, I find that today I have nothing more to say.
As an un-fallen soldier I'm as angry and grieved at these losses as I am about the lives we threw away in the Middle East or Vietnam. Even the rhetoric - "heroes" - is the same, whether we send GIs into the streets of Basra with hillbilly armor or nurses into the plague ward with homemade masks and re-used gloves.
I understand how you feel, my friend. But I'm too sick and too cynical to feel the outrage. Our country has decided that we are all expendable. So let the poor sods have their flag. We're all being driven into the minefield now."
My family was comparatively lucky back about a hundred years ago. My grandfather made it back in one piece from the trenches. As did my grandmother's brothers, only one of them had a sniff of the mustard gas but he lived on into the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteOn Memorial Day I still honor my grandfather's comrades & those of my great-uncles comrades who did not come home and were buried in France. But the US KIA toll of 116,000 in WW-I is dwarfed by the 500- to 800,000 US deaths from the 1918/19 flu pandemic. That is at least a four to one ratio, but split the difference and perhaps it is closer to five and a half to one. I'm guessing the relationship is similar worldwide?
Our family was also extremely lucky with that flu pandemic. No deaths or serious illnesses that I'm aware of. Farm living maybe?
And almost all those dead from WWI were dead becuase Wilson was one of the worst U.S: presidents in history. He campaigned on avoiding entering the war and then did enter for an insanely stupid pretence or reason:
DeleteThe submarine war, which was all but guaranteed to become worse, not better, if the U.S. enters the war.
I suppose the U.S: could have ended the entire German Atlantic submarine warfare with a single stroke:
It could have sent a giant convoy with the USN battlefleet to Germany, laden with a million tons of food. It could have done so during the famine winter of 1916/17 and Germany would have been glad to stop the Atlantic submarine warfare in return.
But somehow the UK violating the international rules of naval warfare was all fine.
Smedley Butler was probably right about the real reason; Wall Street didn't want the UK and France to default on the Wall Street loans and that's why the U.S. went to war. So the UK and France could extract from Germany and Austria-Hungary the reparations needed to repay Wall Street.
I've read several counterfactual ruminations on WW1 and several have posited that the US entry led to the "worst case" outcome; the Entente held out long past their populations' tolerance, and - rather than a negotiated peace of exhaustion - the Allied victory and the subsequent punitive actions taken at Versailles effectively guaranteed the second world war.
DeleteRegardless of that, yes...Wilson was a disaster (and that's not even bringing in the constitutional mess that was the post-stroke reign of Edith Wilson...) and his defeat in 1920 led to another series of worthless Chief Executives in Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover (who was a personally smart man but politically totally the wrong guy for 1929...).
War boils down to few being placed at great risk to reduce the damage done to the many.
ReplyDeletehttps://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.com/2018/09/never-was-so-much-owed-by-so-many-to-so.html
This can be transferred to the pandemic; some healthcare workers are exposed to great risks so the public as a whole suffers less.
Somehow something on the order of 5...15% of the adult population (suspiciously close to my general estimate on the prevalence of dangerous idiocy) doesn't agree that it should bear any burden in the overall effort. Much less any extraordinary burden.
The weird thing is that they are kinda volunteering for being a high risk group, but I doubt that they fully understand this.
Sven -
ReplyDeleteThe US Congress overwhelmingly declared war on Germany. Wilson was a bit player. 82 for war in the Senate with only six against, and Wilson's party only held a slim majority. 373 for war in the House with 50 against, and Wilson's party was a minority.
I'm sure that the banksters and our false neutrality was part of the reason for our entering the war. And Wilson's unfettered moralism. But not all.
A certain infamous telegram had something to do with it. And two years before that telegram German Naval Intelligence officer Franz von Rintelen was meeting with Victoriano Huerta the deposed Mexican president also trying to instigate a US/MX war.
Plus Admiral von Holtzendorff's birdbrained push to resume 'unrestricted' submarine attacks in January 1917. He and the military brass in Germany apparently never realized the impossibility of blockading the UK unless they had greater naval strength than the Royal Navy or at the least parity. Germany was a victim of her oceanogrphic bottleneck.
Another reason was Americans sympathy for Belgium. My mother's sister along with a million other infant girls born around that time were named after Edith Cavell.
The Zeppelin bombing campaign of London stirred some feelings here.
Sabotage by German agents at Black Tom Island in July 1916 and then in Lyndhurst in January 1917 had something to do with the war declaration also. The Black Tom explosion, inadvertently or not, damaged the Statue of Liberty in addition to its main target. German agents also incited US labor strikes.
Yeah, and the british had a huge propaganda campaign going on in the U.S..
DeleteNothing of that sort changes the principal issue that nothing was to be gained or to be improved by going to war. He inflicted additional net damage on his country.
Maybe u guys should change the oath off office towards protecting the citizens of the country, not just the constitution. That's how ours are worded.
My understanding is that the British - whose "Room 40" was reading German mail for most of the war - were the conduit for the Zimmerman telegram as part of the psyops they were conducting in the U.S. So the telegram wasn't exactly a sort of "neutral" provocation. It was a brutally stupid mistake by the Wilhelmstraße, but it was also another piece of the British pushing the U.S. towards the Allies...
DeleteYes, the Brits were masters of propaganda. And we and they spoke a common language. It was effective. German propaganda in the US was not as successful. They subsidized some friendly newspapers. They misguidedly focused on German-Americans and Irish-Americans instead of the population as a whole. And had they tried, there was a language and cultural barrier to their efforts.
DeleteI suspect that LaFayette and American sympathy for France had a lot more to do with the Declaration of War than did Brit agitprop.
But your blaming it all on Wilson appears to be endorsement of the extreme end of the Unitary Executive Theory pushed by President Moron & his-personal-attorney Barr & Dead-Eye Dick Cheney. I reject that theory and all it implies no matter what political party pushes it, or what country pushes it in a different form.
We have gotten far afield of FDChief's theme in this post. Any truth do you think to the recent article on Spanish Flu deaths in Germany helping to lead the way to Nazism?
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/spanish-flu-experience-in-germany-helped-fuel-the-nazi-ascent-to-power-new-york-fed-paper-concludes-2020-05-08
Congress does not declare war on another country if POTUS is not on board. You practically cannot wage war if the president doesn't want to. So POTUS deserves the blame for a needlesswar even if Congress declares it.
DeleteGreat many things happened during the 1920's hat were far more influential than the Flu of 1919. Hyperinflation is still in collective memory, the pandemic of 1919 isn't. There were civil war actions in German cities and some of them were regional in nature, even threatening national unity. The reparations burden was considered to be extreme (Austria-Hungary had collapsed, so Germany got blamed for everything) even though it wasn't in practical terms (net loan inflow largely neutralised reparations outflow until 1929).
There wereconservatives being conservatives, the left was divided between socail democrats and communists, the upper class ventured into political sponsoring, there was the terrible recession, austerity policies in the recession, the rural population was stuck in the 19th century with most farms being too small, parts of Germany were occupied into 1923 and so on.
It's impossible to trace the conservatives' alliance with the Fascists that produced the Reichstag majority that the fascists never got by elections to any particular cause.There are plenty correlations, but causations are difficult if not impossible to prove.
And I know I keep hammering on this, but my main point is that it didn't have to happen this way!
ReplyDeleteThe U.S. government COULD have done what places like South Korea and Germany did; ramp up the technical means of dealing with this pathogen, light off a massive, WW2 "Why We Fight" kind of social messaging, act responsibly and model responsible behavior (put on your fucking face mask, Donnie, Mikey, you assholes!), kick in the sort of federal spending that created the "Arsenal of Democracy" in 1943...
There would still have been a lot of death and a lot of economic pain. But not the way it's gone or it's going to go. Like I said to my friend; we're all being herded into the minefield because to have dug in, flattened the overwatching enemy positions, sent in the sappers and cleared lanes through the sonofabitch would have taken time and money and patience and we're Amurrikuns, by Gawd, and we don't do no pussy patience!!
We've killed all these poor people like the women and kids we're bombing in various unpaved parts of the world, and for equally poor reasons.
"The U.S. government COULD have done what places like South Korea and Germany did"
ReplyDeleteIMHO a better example than germany would be Japan. South Korea and Japan managed to avoid high death rate and high economic damage, better than every larger western country. We should use the "summer break" of the epidemic to understand the reasons and try to implement useful measures in autumn.
Ulenspiegel
SoKo & Japan had better national leadership, perhaps a thousand times better than President Moron. Plus they had better low-level leadership that arranged smarter use of information sharing, widespread testing, and a well organized contact-tracing effort.
DeleteMeanwhile I hear that the self-declared genius in the WH is hopping mad that Angela has refused to attend the G7 Summit in Washington, which he has been wanting to brand as the Comeback Summit.
"We should use the "summer break" of the epidemic to understand the reasons and try to implement useful measures in autumn."
DeleteHahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahahaha!
"understand"? Understand?
This is Trumpworld, my brotha. We don't do no steekin' understand. We go with our gut. We act, like manly men, we create our own reality (remember THAT..?), we act first and think...later, if at all.
There's no way in hell that the current Administration is going to even pretend to "understand" ways that this nation could better deal with The Plague, much less implement them if - as I note - it costs rich white men time, money, inconvenience, or anything else. Once it was obvious that this stuff kills mostly poor people, and dark people, and poor, dark people the chances that the Trumpkins would give a shit went from near-zero to absolute zero.
No. We're going to have to run through the mines and just hope to hell that that thing under our boot is a pebble and not the tines of an S-mine.
We're fucked.